Is Portkey free? What it actually costs in 2026
Portkey's Developer plan is free forever with 10,000 recorded logs a month — requests keep flowing past the cap, only logging stops. Pro is $49 a month for 100,000 logs, plus $9 per extra 100,000.
Free Forever covers the gateway, prompt templates, playground and 10k logged requests a month; exceeding it does not block traffic. Pro adds 100k logs and overages at $9 per additional 100k requests up to 3 million. Enterprise starts at 10 million logs with RBAC, SSO and budget controls.
What the free tier actually includes
- 10,000 recorded logs a month
- Requests beyond the cap are served but not logged
- Pro: 100,000 logs, then $9 per 100,000 up to 3M
Where the wall is
Log 10,001 — softly. Nothing breaks; you go blind. For a gateway whose value is observability and cost tracking, unlogged requests are the thing you were paying attention for, so the free plan ends where the product starts.
After that: Pro $49 a month (100k logs, +$9 per additional 100k requests up to 3M); Enterprise by contact for 10M+ logs, RBAC, SSO, granular budgets and rate limits.
Can you self-host Portkey? Yes
Portkey's gateway is open source and runs on your own box (Portkey Gateway); LiteLLM and Helicone are the other self-hostable gateways compared here.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting LiteLLM
Self-hosting Helicone
When paying is still the right call
If you want routing, caching, guardrails and observability working this afternoon with nothing to operate, Portkey is a reasonable purchase and the self-hosted options genuinely cost more in engineering time than the subscription. It also makes sense for teams without anyone who wants to own a piece of production infrastructure, and for organisations that need the compliance paperwork a vendor can supply and a self-hosted binary cannot.
What you are locked into
Light by the standards of this market, and worth saying so plainly — the gateway speaks the OpenAI-compatible API, so pointing your client at a different base URL is usually the whole migration. What does not move is the accumulated layer around it: prompt templates, guardrail configuration, virtual keys and the observability history all live in Portkey's control plane.
If you would rather not pay: LiteLLM
LiteLLM
One OpenAI-compatible API in front of 100+ providers, running on your own box.
Free and self-hosted — you pay the model providers directly with no markup, plus hosting for a small VM (roughly $20–50/month). A paid enterprise tier exists for SSO, audit logs and support.
See all 4 Portkey alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Portkey AI's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-26 — 31 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.